Fed up to the back teeth

From the maggots in the sailors' meat in The Battleship Potemkin to the magnificent banquet served to the sad old-timers in Babette's Feast, food in its most disgusting and delightful forms has been a major feature of the movies. Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, a polemical, knockabout documentary in the Michael Moore manner, belongs very much to the disgusting, puritanical branch of the food genre.

It follows on from Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe, in which Marcello Mastroianni and some chums set out to kill themselves in an orgy of food and sex, and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, where the disgusting gourmand Mr Creosote eats until he explodes all over a restaurant.

Spurlock, a New York-based movie-maker and playwright, whose first feature-length film this is, has addressed himself to the problems posed by the worldwide spread of fast-food chains and the rise in obesity. Spurlock becomes Sherlock as he investigates 'The Case of the Expanding Waistline', and he's put himself at the centre of the story.

An engaging, articulate, self-deprecating man in his thirties, he decided to become the guinea pig in an experiment as dangerous as the crazy stunts in the TV series Jackass, and as artistically motivated as Robert De Niro and Renée Zellweger putting on weight to lend authenticity to roles.

He set out to live for a month by eating three meals a day bought at McDonald's, which has 30,000 branches in more than 100 countries; there's even one in a New York hospital: 'At least you're closer when the coronary kicks in,' he observes. A battery of doctors and nutritionists examines him before he sets out, then monitor his progress.

Things don't go well as he edges towards joining the 50 per cent of Americans who are clinically obese, and risks becoming one of the 400,000 who die each year of obesity-related illnesses. On the third day, he's throwing up through his car window after downing a Big Mac and a super-size bag of fries. Within a week, his girlfriend, a vegan chef, tells us: 'I think the saturation fats are impeding the blood flow to his penis.'

Between these reports on a regimen that takes his weight from 185.5 pounds to 210 and causes unexpected liver trouble (his GP recommends ending the experiment), Shurlock travels around America. He bombards us with statistics, interviews doctrs and lawyers, visits schools to see how unbalanced the kids' diets are, films a stomach by-pass operation performed on an obese Texan, and meets a Californian who eats 750 McDonald's burgers a year without any apparent ill-effects. A bunch of four-year-olds he questions can't recognise a picture of Jesus Christ but they can all identify Ronald McDonald.

He doesn't manage to contact the head of McDonald's, and a woman with the grandiose title of McDonald's director of social responsibility proves to be too busy to give him an audience. But evidently the company took notice of the publicity surrounding Spurlock winning the best director award at the Sundance Festival. They started to publicise their salads and have abandoned the super-size portions.

This is a funny, frightening and salutary film that should be shown in schools to counteract the billions spent on advertising by McDonald's and other pedlars of fast food and confectionery who target young children with the intention of hooking them for life.

What Shurlock is dealing with is a vast global movement and the effects of immense social changes over the past 30 or 40 years, and it's also a matter of class. He looks back nostalgically to the days when his mom cooked three meals a day for the family down home in West Virginia. The pictures of her look like Saturday Evening Post covers and he's a credit to her.